Frequency Diverse Array-Enabled RIS-Aided Integrated Sensing and Communication

Integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) has been envisioned as a prospective technology to enable ubiquitous sensing and communications in next-generation wireless networks. In contrast to existing works on reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) aided ISAC systems using conventional phased arrays (PAs), this paper investigates a frequency diverse array (FDA)-enabled RIS-aided ISAC system, where the FDA aims to provide a distance-angle-dependent beampattern to effectively suppress the clutter, and RIS is employed to establish high-quality links between the BS and users/target. We aim to maximize sum rate by jointly optimizing the BS transmit beamforming vectors, the covariance matrix of the dedicated radar signal, the RIS phase shift matrix, the FDA frequency offsets and the radar receive equalizer, while guaranteeing the required signal-to-clutter-plus-noise ratio (SCNR) of the radar echo signal. To tackle this challenging problem, we first theoretically prove that the dedicated radar signal is unnecessary for enhancing target sensing performance, based on which the original problem is much simplified. Then, we turn our attention to the single-user single-target (SUST) scenario to demonstrate that the FDA-RIS-aided ISAC system always achieves a higher SCNR than its PA-RIS-aided counterpart. Moreover, it is revealed that the SCNR increment exhibits linear growth with the BS transmit power and the number of BS receive antennas. In order to effectively solve this simplified problem, we leverage the fractional programming (FP) theory and subsequently develop an efficient alternating optimization (AO) algorithm based on symmetric alternating direction method of multipliers (SADMM) and successive convex approximation (SCA) techniques. Numerical results demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed algorithm in terms of sum rate and radar SCNR.